Table of Contents

News Analysis

Event

On 6 November 2013, Cisco announced the details of its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI), including new switches with embedded application-aware functionality delivered via a fabric controller. The solution scales to very large data centers and promises better integration between applications and the underlying network.

Analysis

ACI is especially important to Cisco now that emerging software-defined networking (SDN) and related technologies are threatening its longtime dominance. The announcement follows similar competitive solutions from VMware, HP, Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent, and sets up a major battle for data center influence, particularly between Cisco and VMware.

ACI offers several benefits:

It provides a strong network fabric and includes real-time application health statistics.

ACI supports both physical and virtual environments, is "agnostic" with regard to virtualization software and overcomes the potential disconnect in competing solutions between overlay and underlay.

In Gartner's view, Cisco’s track record with application-focused offerings is poor, as evidenced by its departure from the application delivery controller (ADC) market.

ACI forces customers to buy hardware to achieve networking agility — alternative solutions do not, are quicker to implement and are often less expensive for customers that don’t require new hardware.

The partner ecosystem is missing several key players (including Riverbed and Palo Alto), which limits the benefit for those who’ve deployed best-of-breed solutions.

While ACI improves agility, it depends on an architectural model that limits innovation and will not provide the long-term strategic benefits of SDN. We predict that initial ACI deployments will be in "greenfield" opportunities for existing customers where the network team has greater influence than the virtualization team. Consequently, significant organizational conflict may arise around who “owns” application networking solutions.

Recommendations

Senior IT infrastructure leaders should:

Pilot ACI and competitively bid versus alternatives (such as VMware and HP) if networking agility is a challenge in your environment.

Drive consensus between virtualization and networking teams before purchasing any networking agility solution.